Kansy slowly recovered, giggling as the nurse splashed a duck up and down in the tin bath tub, giving it a silly squeaky voice. She was dried off with soft towels and taken across to the dining room where she joined the other kids. They were soon all laughing and joking as they had done the previous evenings, though Kansy noticed that no one mentioned anything that had occurred that afternoon. She didn’t press it; those cold grey eyes and that maddened hungry look that had been on Dr. Stone’s face as she had fallen through the door still haunted her.
Kansy was more exhausted than she realised, for no sooner had her head hit the pillow she was in a deep sleep. Her eyelids were heavy when she awoke, though she forced them open, this time knowing what to expect. Little Mother was sitting on the edge of the bed. Tonight she was dressed in the deep blues and greys of storm clouds, with her hair the dark colour of water at night. Kansy could hear a storm raging against the shutters outside, reasoning this as why she was comparing Little Mother to the rain.
“You did well child. You chose well.” Her voice was light and airy, with a deeper grounded tone somewhere beneath it all. Kansy looked up at her, meeting her eyes unflinching this time.
“What was in there that he wanted to see? What was it I stopped him getting to?”
Little mother smiled at her, an expression so filled with sadness it made Kansy jump up and hug her tightly as she would her mother whenever she looked sad. Little Mother rested her arms gently around the girl, resting her cheek on the top of her head.
“You stopped him from finding me child. You prevented a great sadness from falling on this world long before its time. You have been so brave this far my child, I dare not ask you to do more. But ask I must. If you will come with me? I can show you more.”
Kansy looked up into her deep eyes, and stood up on the cold stone floor. She nodded as seriously as she could, earning herself an amused smile from Little Mother. Taking Kansy’s hand, she walked to the door of the bedroom and out into the hall. Kansy didn’t even think to look back to her sleeping friends.
Outside, the hallway…wasn’t the hallway any more. Instead they stood upon a hard black surface with strange white and yellow lines on it in places. Large, monstrous boxy machines on wheels were strewn all over the place, most bent and crumpled, some with the wheels facing the sky. It was daytime, or so she guessed, but the sky was a deep rolling grey. Big buildings stood all around her, though they were unlike any buildings Kansy had ever seen. They were made of a reddish brown stuff, and there was more glass around than she ever thought possible. Most of it was shattered on the ground all around them, though some stood in jagged patches in the window holes, leading into the dark interiors of the buildings. The wind tore at strange objects, making them whirl around with the dust and off down the street. Little Mother led Kansy onwards, letting her take in this strange alien world.
“This is what this city would have become, had you allowed Dr. Stone to gain access to the energy. We are many years into the future now child, but these events were not supposed to happen until further still. You are helping me prevent that.”
As they walked, Kansy realised there was no sight or sound of any living creature, save for herself and Little Mother walking at her side. She pressed in close, not wanting to be separated or lost in this strange and desolate landscape. As they came to the end of one of the larger buildings, a place which must have once been some form of park came into view. Now however, it was a wasteland of dead plant life. Rough stumps lay now where trees should once have stood, and where grass had been underfoot there now lay a soggy brown mess of rotting plant mass. No birds sang, no dogs barked. Kansy realised that this land was truly dead.
“The institute means well,” Little Mother’s voice cut into Kansy’s horrified thoughts, dragging her back to the present. “They never thought this would happen. They thought they could use the life force of the planet to sustain themselves forever. They never realised that they would always end up taking more than they could give. In the end they took too much. They hurt the planet too much, and ended the cycle. Now there is nothing but death.”
Kansy could feel the tears falling from her eyes, making her vision all watery. This couldn’t be her world, it just couldn’t. It was too horrible to even think about.
“We have to stop them from trying again child. You must destroy their equipment. Without it they have no hope of replicating what they did today. Without it, we can push this future back until it won’t matter any more.”
She looked down at Kansy, her own eyes swimming with tears that fell like silver from her eyes. Kansy felt as if her heart would break, and it was then she knew she had to help, no matter what. There was just one problem.
“I-I don’t know how,” she managed to choke out through her tears. Little Mother crouched down and took Kansy in her arms.
“Hush little one, hush. I am with you. Close your eyes.”
Kansy did so, and when she opened them again she was alone, out in the corridor outside of the room with the strange hats. Wasting no time, before she lost her nerve, she headed inside. The door creaked alarmingly loudly, something she hadn’t noticed in the daylight. Without bothering to shut it behind her, Kansy ran across the room to where she had seen the nurse and Dr. Stone take the hats from. There was a cupboard there which mercifully wasn’t locked. Inside was a load of that strange stringy stuff that had been attached to the buttons on her head. She looked at it all in confusion, what was she to do now?
Voices echoed down the corridor outside, making Kansy nearly shriek out loud. Hands clasped firmly over her own mouth, she bolted for the nearby desk where she dived underneath and huddled there, trying to breathe quietly, heart racing.
“I’m sure I heard nothing down here Dr. Stone. The children were all worn out after today’s tests; I highly doubt any of them are wondering around this late. Besides, where would they go?”
“I’m telling you Sandra I heard a noise down here. And look, they might…” There was a long pause. “I know I locked that door before finishing for the night. Someone is definitely down here.”
Kansy heard the door creak loudly as it was pushed further open and the flickering light of a candle illuminated the room. She curled up tighter, hands tightly over her mouth to stop herself from screaming. She was so scared of what they would do when they found her, she would be in so much trouble!
Footsteps creaked over the wooden boards, and a gentle thud above her head told her that Dr. Stone had placed the candle down on the desk.
“Looks like they’ve been messing with the wiring. Good lord, this could set us back months! And I was so close with that kid today. If I can just push her that bit further, we will have the access we need.”
A crash of thunder echoed through the building, followed by a loud racket coming from a ways down the corridor. Dr. Stone cursed, words Kansy had never even heard, before racing out of the room, followed closely by Sandra. Kansy crawled her way out from under the desk. It was as if a voice was whispering to her what to do. She reached inside the bottom draw of the desk and pulled out two bottles of clear liquid, which she quickly emptied all over the ‘wires’ inside the cupboards, and all over the floor. She then threw all of the papers she could find into the mess she had made. Finally she took the candle up, took a deep breath, and threw it at the cupboard.
The effect was instantaneous. The liquid caught on fire with a flash of blue flame. Sparks flew out of the cupboard, making Kansy back away with a squeak. The flames licked up the wood, and down onto the floor where they greedily ate away at the scattered papers and cloth rugs that lay there. Thick black smoke began filling the room, and Kansy fled. The same voice seemed to whisper directions to her. At one point, before she even knew what she was doing she dived into a nearby cupboard and closed the door, breathing hard as she hid in the dark. Footsteps pounded past her hiding place and she could hear shouts in the distance. She had to get back to the bedroom and fast, before she was missed.
&nbs
p; Luck was on her side, and Kansy made it back into her bed mere moments before the door was burst open and a nurse came in shouting for them to get up. A strange fuzziness seemed to have settled over Kansy, and she allowed herself to be bundled along with the other four, barely aware of what was going on. Shouts were coming from the distance, and someone was ringing a bell nearby. Thick black smoke poured out of one of the windows, and the nurses were quick to lead the five of them away. The rain was still pouring down from the sky, soaking them all in seconds. As water dripped from Kansy’s hair, she could have sworn she saw a figure, dressed in moonlight and with rain clouds for hair waving to her from the shadows. Then the figure was gone, and Kansy was bundled off into the night to a place of shelter and safety.
The next day found them fitted out with new clothes and each with a new toy. Much of the institute had been damaged in the fire from the previous night, caused by the storm blowing a candle over it was said, and so the children were to be sent home early. This was not met with groans of disappointment as expected, but rather a quiet acceptance from all of them. The fire, along with some of their experiences in the institute, would stay with them all for some time to come. Kansy more than the rest. The cart journey back home seemed to take no time, and before she knew it her mother’s arms were around her once more, and the comforting sounds and smells of home were around her. She slept deeply that first night back in her own bed, rising late for the first time in years. Her mother had given her a day off chores and such to recover from the events of the city, and Kansy took the time to head up to the clearing in the woods.
As she had thought, the fallen tree was long gone, and there was nothing left to mark where it had been. Still, she dug a small hole about where she thought the entrance to their den had been, and within it she planted a small acorn she had found earlier that day. She whispered her thanks to Little Mother as she covered it back up with the earth, before heading back down the fields to the rainbow cottage, and the rest of her life.
***
The End
1.
I am the last of my kind. The human race is all but wiped out, and the few remaining survivors are mad. What killed us? Arrogance and our own sheer bloody mindedness. We looked out at the universe and saw a thing to control, to tame. We looked inwards and did the same thing. We failed to realise that there truly are some things that man was not meant to know. We sought them out anyway, and the knowledge has destroyed us. An entire species wiped out by its own mistakes. But more than that, we have taken our planet and solar system with us.
It is difficult to explain.
I am one of the few people who still remember what happened, what we did. In my last few lucid days I need to write it down, commit it to the cosmos to serve as a warning to other species; do not follow our path, do not do what we have done for that way lies only death and destruction. This knowledge must not die with the human race.
2.
The Ancient Ones are coming. There is nothing we can do to stop Them, praise Their great names! In times before the first single celled organism developed on that green-blue marble we call home They were here. Wandering the cosmos in great numbers. Oh how wondrous They are, and how terrible. We strove to become Them, not merely content to worship from afar. In our great folly we thought we could become gods.
Ha! The true gods now laugh at us from the farthest reaches of the universe. We have been punished for our blasphemy, all of us. Soon I will join Them to be judged. I welcome it. I am the last of the heathens, the last betrayer. The Ancient Ones will have Their revenge. All I have to do is wait. So close now, I can hear the laughter...
3.
Humanity has always strived to increase its knowledge base. We were a curious species; that has been our greatest asset, and also our downfall. In our blind arrogance we thought there was nothing we could not do, nothing we could not understand if we put our minds to it. And we were right, but we never thought through the consequences. And there were some of us who never stopped to think about the methods we used to get there.
I was one of them. The means justified the end, or so I thought. There is so much blood on my hands that I do not know if I could ever be clean, even if it weren't the end for me and the rest of my species.
For centuries we strove to unlock the mysteries of our own minds. We knew, somehow, that there was something great locked inside us, inside the grey flesh that animated our too fragile bodies. If the human race could somehow just unlock the secrets of our own brains, our own minds, then we would be invincible. So we worked for hundreds of years, increasing our knowledge. Sometimes we hurt each other to do so.
The name is lost now to time, but there was one particular organisation who were obsessed with unlocking the human mind. No one really knows why they were so focused on this one goal above all, and I'm not convinced anyone ever really knew. But they wanted those secrets, and nothing was going to stand in their way.
Even if you do not have the key for a particular lock, you can still pick it and it will open eventually, either through skill or sheer luck. I do not know which this was, but they succeeded. They—we—found what they were looking for. And then all hell broke loose.
4.
The Ancient Ones were displeased that we sought to raise ourselves up that we might walk among Them, oh yes. Only the Chosen may ascend to be with the Ancient Ones, and we elected to choose ourselves.
Our arrogance was our great folly. Could we not see that the Great Ones would mete out punishment for our audacity? Did we not see that They would smite us down that we would know our place? The Ancient Ones will brook no rivals and we dared to challenge Their mighty rule. By Their will was humanity brought to its knees, the price we paid for our knowledge. The era of humanity was glorious but brief, and it ended with fire and death. In the afterlife we will be judged by our Betters, those whom we should have realised were our Masters. I for one welcome it.
5.
It all happened so quickly. At first we simply unlocked a single human mind, tapping into the totality of potential contained within. We'd expected the early attempts to go wrong somehow, but we were met with success the first time. The test subject became more than human, became something that understood the greatest mysteries of the universe. With just one human mind unlocked we gained the knowledge required to unlock the entire species simultaneously. One mind gave us what we needed to rewrite the cosmos, they were the master key – unlock one mind and you can unlock them all! Then what could an entire race of near omnipotent beings achieve? What couldn't we achieve?
There were some in the organization who felt that only the best and brightest should be allowed to tap into their full potential. That this gift should be given out carefully to an elite cadre of certain minds who, naturally, agreed with them on certain things.
My colleagues and I disagreed. If humanity were to become gods, it was a gift that needed to be given to us all. We felt that discrimination and bigotry of any kind had no place in an enlightened mind. We thought we were doing everyone a favour, but we were wrong. We were so very wrong.
6.
Praise Them! Praise Them you miserable worms! In your folly you thought to join Them without earning the right. How typical of mankind to take what they want without checking first. Well it has doomed us all. Doomed! Much of my race is already dead, having been thrown down by Their glorious vengeance.
Sssh! Can you not hear Them? They approach, so close now I can taste the anticipation. My Masters, the Great and Ancient Ones, the First to unlock the true potential of Their minds. They will come for me too. I have escaped Their wrath so far, instead being given a separate task. Now that mine is finished They are coming to complete Theirs.
I prostrate myself before Their glory. They are everything we hope to become but never could. They are all. My counterpart seeks to warn others against the folly of opposing my Masters and I let him. We must speak the words that others may know Their glories and come to worship Them as I have, as
is only right. He will fall soon. Like all the others.
I will consume him too.
7.
We rigged up a system that let us tap into the brain waves of every person on the planet. The organization had engineered the chips that were put in everyone’s brain to help them access their memories and information databanks, and of course we - in turn - could access them. Now we could use it to send the signal to any person on the planet and any offset humans less than 1 AU from Earth. It took a lot of work, a lot of power and a lot of resources, but we did it. Something like 90% of the human race would receive the "upgrade" at the same time. At the time we had no idea what the consequences would be, and if I could go back in time I would shoot each and every one of us before we could flip that switch. Sadly that's not an option, even in this post-human future.
Two thirds of the population went mad almost immediately, their minds unable to process all the knowledge they suddenly contained. We realised just how little we truly knew about the universe, and for many people the sudden knowledge of what lay beyond the tiny bubble of universe we'd seen with our own eyes was too much. The new knowledge ate through them, destroying their minds and reverting those affected to some sort of brutal animalistic state. These people very quickly tore each other apart. Forming into factions, they wiped out their enemies before turning on each other. Within days Earth was a blood bath, and the human race on the brink of extinction.
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